Yet five men got into this metal tube and tried to go to the bottom of the darkest depths of the ocean. Again: driven by a game controller. I’ve never more fully understood and yet not understood men than after reading about this tiny submarine controlled by—one more time—a video game controller. There’s a reason men make great and strange discoveries and also have a shorter life expectancy than women.
-Nellie Bowles, from here
Sometimes, I wish that I could be around in another 30 years, to see where technology has taken us. But, that privilege will be reserved for the fresh, young faces that I observed yesterday. Be good to each other. Time flies.
-Rick Georges, from here
It may be wise to question whether we should always be living in the moment and whether this is the best way to foster creative thinking. Finding this ‘middle way’ between mindfulness and mind wandering can help us enjoy the optimal benefits of both ways of thinking. Mindfulness helps us truly see what’s around us—a skill of paramount importance in life and art—but it must be balanced with giving the mind space to dream, fantasize, and simply roam free.
-as cut and pasted from here
A lot of times we’re not interested in truth – we’re interested in the elimination of uncertainty, and that fact alone causes us to believe things that have little relation to reality.
-Morgan Housel, from this post
We are built with an almost infinite capacity to believe things because the beliefs are advantageous for us to hold, rather than because they are even remotely related to the truth.
-Dee Hock, as culled from here
But in itself morality consists in the "side constraints," to use Nozick's expression, that make agreement rather than coercion into the foundation of our social conduct. These side constraints are embodied in a system of rights and duties: around each individual is a wall of rights that protect him or her from unjust coercion, and on every individual is imposed a set of duties by which those rights are guaranteed.
-Roger Scruton, On Human Nature
Universities have long served as gatekeepers for the upper classes, but they are doing less well at what was arguably their greatest twentieth-century triumph: expanding opportunities for the many.
-Joel Kotkin, The Coming of NEO Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class
It was not the same Paris that he had known in the crowd-ruled days of '92 and '93. Ever since the fall of Robespierre in '94 the capital had followed the countryside in an intensifying reaction—religious and political—against the Revolution. Catholicism, led by nonjuring priests, was regaining its hold upon a people that had lost belief in an earthly substitute for supernatural hopes and consolations, for sacraments, ceremonies, and processional holydays. The decadi, or decimal day of rest, was increasingly ignored; the Christian Sunday was flagrantly respected and enjoyed. France was voting for God.
-Will & Ariel Durant, The Age of Napoleon, describing Paris in 1797
To no purpose does the man avoid war who cannot enjoy peace, and to no purpose does the man flee from trouble who does not have what it takes to relish repose.
-Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works, Book 2, Chapter 3
Housing starts surged well above expectations in May, crushing the forecast from every economics group and putting in the largest monthly gain in the number of homes started since January 1990. Looking at the details, gains were broad-based with three of four major regions and both single-family and multi-unit starts contributing. While one month doesn’t make a trend, housing starts are now at the highest level since the previous peak in April of 2022, before mortgage rates began to surge. This signals that the developers may have finally found their footing in what has been a challenging environment for sales. While 30-year mortgage rates continue to hover near 7% it looks like some of the sticker shock from the rapid run-up in financing costs last year is wearing off.
-Brian Wesbury, from here
A man advanced in dignity and age counted drink among the three principal comforts that he used to say he had left in life. But he took it in the wrong way. Fastidiousness is to be avoided in it, and careful selection of wines. If you make your pleasure depend on drinking good wine, you condemn yourself to the pain of sometimes drinking bad wine. We must have a less exacting and freer taste. To be a good drinker, one must not have so delicate a palate. The Germans drink almost all wines with equal pleasure. Their aims is to swallow rather than to taste. They have much the better of the bargain. Their pleasure is much more plentiful and ready at hand.
-Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works, Book Two, Chapter 2
Nevertheless France was weary of revolution . . . Youngsters, constitutionally rebellious, were now rebelling against revolution.
-Will & Ariel Durant, The Age of Napoleon, describing Paris in 1795
I honestly don’t buy the idea that money doesn’t buy happiness. Money can fix a lot of problems in terms of comfort and convenience. But your personal preferences and internal wiring will likely have a bigger impact on your relationship with money and happiness than some number.
-Ben Carlson, from here
People who lived through the rigors of the coronavirus pandemic may demand that the experts prove they were worthy of the trust and obedience they demanded.
-Ann Althouse, as she takes a peek at the presidential crusade of "anti-vaccine activist" Bobby Kennedy, Jr.
Between 1960 and 2005, the share of men with university degrees who married women with university degrees nearly doubled for 25 percent to 48 percent. As Bell observed, parents of high status in a meritocracy will use their advantages to improve their children's prospects, and in this way, "after one generation a meritocracy simply becomes an enclaved class."
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Those who harbor a sense of natural superiority tend to support strong governmental action in line with their personal values and an overconfidence in their own competence, according to research by Slavisa Tasic of the University of Kiev on decision making in government. But the history of unaccountable rule by "experts," or those claiming intellectual superiority, is less than encouraging for liberal democracy.
-Joel Kotkin, The Coming of NEO Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class
You must learn not to overwork a dollar any more that you would a horse. Three per cent is a small load for it to draw; six, a safe one; when it pulls in ten for you it's likely working out West and you've got to watch to see that it doesn't buck; when it makes twenty you own a blame good critter or a mighty foolish one, and you want to make dead sure which; but if it draws a hundred it's playing the races or something just as hard on horses and dollars, and the first thing you know you won't have even a carcass to haul to the glue factory.
-George H. Lorimer, Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son
To develop fully as persons, I have argued we need the virtues that transfer our motives from the animal to the personal center of our being—the virtues that put us in charge of our passions.
-Roger Scruton, On Human Nature
Human beings find their fulfillment in mutual love and self-giving, but they get to this point via a long path of self-development, in which imitation, obedience, and self-control are necessary moments. This is not a hard thing to understand once we see the development of personality in the terms suggested by Aristotle. But it is a hard thing to practice. Nevertheless, when we understand things rightly, we will be motivated to put virtue and good habits back where they belong, at the center of personal life.
-Roger Scruton, On Human Nature
One of my favorite pundits looks at the 2024 presidential race and has some thoughts. Hope he is wrong about Bobby Kennedy, Jr.
To earn the nomination, however, DeSantis will have to persuade an angry Republican base of his alienation from the government he is expected to preside over. He must demonstrate that, despite his orthodox trajectory and obvious ease with handling policy, he is not a mere politician or a creature of the institutions. Just as the Democratic Party today is the home of establishment and reaction, Republicans are the party of populism and revolt. By an inner necessity, the Democrats will nominate a safe insider; that happens to be Joe Biden’s sole qualification for the presidency. The inverse process will turn the Republican contest into a scramble for the outside rail.
When your are stuck, explain your problem to others. Often simply laying out a problem will present a solution. Make "explaining the problem" part of your troubleshooting process.
-Kevin Kelly, Excellent Advice For Living: Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier
“I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren't trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.”
-Umberto Eco, Foucault's
Pendulum
That’s not everything but close enough.
-Ben Carlson, from this post
Thus a population of twenty-one millions depended for its government on more than two thousand separate authorities. The lesser nobility, the knights and free tenants of the Emperor formed confederations among themselves where they were thickest on the ground, or came to an understanding with the chief administrator of the surrounding province where they were few. Yet even making allowances for such arrangements there were over three hundred potentially conflicting authorities in Germany.
Imperial power rested ultimately not on the constitution but on force. . . .
Empty as was the imperial title in 1618, the dynasty had not abandoned the hope of restoring to it the reality of power. With a people as traditional as the Germans a lurking respect for the person of the Emperor was always to be found even among the most rabid exponents of the 'German Liberties'—a feeling which an intelligent Emperor could often exploit.
'The German Liberties' was a phrase which had become popular in the sixteenth century. It stood in theory for the constitutional rights of the individual rulers of the Empire, in fact for anything which the caprice or interest of the princes dictated, a bald truth which does not derogate from the personal sincerity with which most of them believed in their own motives. In the smaller group of authoritarians which centered about the Emperor, the corresponding rallying cry was 'Justice'; the emphasis was on government here, on independence there. Ultimately there must come a breaking point.
-C. V. Wedgwood, The Thirty Years War
................but since he asked, I might hastily add:
Grant by Ron Chernow
Trinity by Leon Uris
The Memory of Old Jack by Wendell Berry
Watership Downs by Richard Adams
The Poetry of Robert Frost edited by E. C. Lathem
Mister Sharpe was in a bad mood. A filthy mood. He was looking for trouble in Sergeant Harper's opinion, and Harper was rarely wrong about Captain Sharpe, and Sergeant Harper knew well enough not to engage his Captain in conversation when Sharpe was in such a black temper, but on the other hand, Harper liked to live dangerously. "I see your uniform has been mended, sir," he said cheerily.
-Bernard Cornwell, Sharpe's Escape
Greatest hits, by their nature, are unusual. And if the media you’re absorbing is selected from a billion possible clips, don’t be surprised if you start to believe that the unusual is normal.
It’s not.
-Seth Godin, from here
........................................Or, as my young son used to say, "this cracks my head up."
And now I remind myself that I must heed William Blake's warning not to attempt to cling to a sublime experience, but rather allow it to come and go with grace. In another of his metaphysical poems, the four-line jewel called "Eternity," he writes:
He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in Eternity's sunrise.
I stand and raise my glass. "It is a great privilege to be here," I say. Then, smiling, I add, "In fact, it is a great privilege simply to be."
-Daniel Klein, Travels with Epicurus
For years I’ve been simultaneously amused and horrified at repeated efforts to replace the mouse and keyboard as the fundamental input devices of computers.
-Freddie deBoer, from here
A short lesson about kindness and generosity:
"I
heard my mom asking our neighbor for some salt. We had salt at home so I asked
her why she was asking.
She
told me, "They don't have much money and they sometimes ask us for things.
So I asked for something small that wouldn't burden them. I want them to feel
as if we needed them too. That way, it will be much easier for them to ask us
for anything they need."
-James Clear, from his June 15 newsletter
The picture that I have been developing of the moral community translates easily into an attendant system of law—the common law whereby disputes and grievances are brought before an impartial judge and resolved according to the ancient principles of natural justice, which advocate the avoidance of bias and the right to a fair hearing. The habit of settling our disputes in that way therefore seems to be the natural adjunct to the moral order. Just those principles that underlie common-law practice in the English-speaking tradition emerge from our spontaneous ways of negotiating solutions to our conflicts. All of the following principles, for example, seem to be accepted by those who lay down their weapons and reason toward solutions instead:
1. Considerations that justify or impugn one person, will, in identical circumstances, justify or impugn another,
2. Rights are to be respected.
3. Obligations are to be fulfilled.
4. Agreements are to be honored.
5. Disputes are to settled by negotiation, not by force.
6. Those who do not respect the rights of others forfeit rights of their own.
-Roger Scruton, On Human Nature
Those principles have been taken as defining the field of "natural law," for the reason that their validity depends only on the idea of negotiation itself and not on the circumstances of the one who embarks on it.
Something like this was surely at the back of Adam Smith's mind when, in his The Theory of Moral Sentiments, he argued for the "impartial spectator" as the true judge of our moral duties. When asking myself what should I do, I entertain the thought of what another would think of my action when observing it with a disinterested eye. If, as I suggest, morality is rooted in the practice of accountability between self-conscious agents, this is exactly what we should expect. The impartial other sets the standard that we all must meet.
-Roger Scruton, On Human Nature
If you view progress as being driven by the genius of individuals, of course it’s hard to imagine a future where things are dramatically better, because no individual is orders of magnitudes smarter than average.
But when you view it as one person coming up with a small idea, another person copying that idea and tweaking it a little, another taking that insight and manipulating it a bit, another yet taking that product and combining it with something else – incremental, tiny bits, little ideas mixing, joining, blending, mutating, and compounding together – it’s suddenly much more conceivable.
-Morgan Housel, from here
Milton's allegory is not just a portrait of our kind; it is an invitation to kindness. It shows us what we are and what we must live up to. And it sets a standard for art. Take away religion, however, take away philosophy, take away the higher aims of art, and you deprive ordinary people of the ways in which they can represent their apartness. Human nature, once something to live up to, becomes something to live down to instead. Biological reductionism nurtures this "living down," which is why people so readily fall for it. It makes cynicism respectable and degeneracy chic. It abolishes our kind—and with it our kindness.
-Roger Scruton, On Human Nature
Creeping stagnation ought to be recognized as the central economic issue of our time. . . .
Why are we stagnating? In my view, the answer is simple: America has the people, the ideas, and the investment capital to grow. We just can’t get the permits. We are a great Gulliver, tied down by miles of Lilliputian red tape.
-Craig Newmark, channeling John Cochrane
I have a proto-theory: That our brains tend to produce dreams at all times, and that during waking hours, our brains tame the dream machine into perception and truthiness. At night, we let it run free to keep the brain areas occupied. The foundational mode of the intelligence is therefore dreaming.
Here’s how I got there: For a while I’ve been intensely exploring generative AI systems, creating both text and visual images almost daily, and I am increasingly struck by their similarity to dreams. The AIs seem to produce dream images and dream stories and dream answers. The technical term is “hallucinations” but I think they are close to dreams. I’ve come to suspect that this similarity between dreams and generative AI is not superficial, poetic, or coincidental. My unexpected hunch is that we’ll discover that the mechanism that generates dreams in our own heads will be the same (or very similar) to the ones that current neural net AI’s use to generate text and images.
-Kevin Kelly, from this post
I would urge everyone in and around the AI policy space to steer their thinking away from the idea that they can predict the economic impacts of future technologies, and toward the development of economic institutions that will minimize any downsides. Let’s stick with what worked in the last industrial revolution, and not try to be sci-fi prophets.
-Noah Smith, from this post
I no longer think that all wars are unnecessary; but some are, and I still think that the Thirty Years War was one of these. It need not have happened and it settled nothing worth settling. No doubt it assured the replacement of Spain by France as the dominant power in Western Europe, an event of some importance in the history of the western world. But the same result might have been achieved at far less cost and without a generation of war among the Germans who were only indirectly concerned in the matter at all. Several statesmen of genius outside of Germany from time to time dominated the course of the war; no statesman of genius inside of Germany appeared to put a stop to it. The dismal course of the conflict, dragging on from one decade to the next and from one deadlock to the next, seems to me an object lesson on the dangers and disasters which can arise when men of narrow hearts and little minds are in high places.
-C. V. Wedgwood, as she completes her Introduction to The Thirty Years War
History reflects the period in which it is written as much as any other branch of literature. Although the historian's material is much more rigidly circumscribed than that of the novelist or poet, he, like them, has to bring to the understanding and presentation of his material his own experience of life and the imaginative equipment peculiar to him and to his time. . . .
. . . When all allowance has been made for exaggeration, hard luck stories, and propaganda, the weight of the evidence still shows that the human suffering caused by the war was appalling. I feel now, as I did twenty years ago, the one task of the political historian is to show the repercussions of policy on the lives of the governed and to arouse in the reader imaginative sympathy with those multitudes of fellow beings who were victims as well as actors in the events of the past.
-Cicely Veronica Wedgwood, from her Introduction to The Thirty Years War
The core mistake the automation-kills-jobs doomers keep making is called the Lump Of Labor Fallacy. This fallacy is the incorrect notion that there is a fixed amount of labor to be done in the economy at any given time, and either machines do it or people do it – and if machines do it, there will be no work for people to do.
The Lump Of Labor Fallacy flows naturally from naive intuition, but naive intuition here is wrong. When technology is applied to production, we get productivity growth – an increase in output generated by a reduction in inputs. The result is lower prices for goods and services. As prices for goods and services fall, we pay less for them, meaning that we now have extra spending power with which to buy other things. This increases demand in the economy, which drives the creation of new production – including new products and new industries – which then creates new jobs for the people who were replaced by machines in prior jobs. The result is a larger economy with higher material prosperity, more industries, more products, and more jobs.
-Marc Andreessen, from this Substack, why-ai-will-save-the-world
For all the books on all the shelves of all the world's libraries, life must in the end be lived as a series of discrete moments and individual decisions. What we face may be complicated, but what we do about it is simple. "Do the right thing," Laura White told her son. "Do unto others," a teacher told his disciples, "as you would have them do unto you." . . .
How does one thrive through a maelstrom of change? By standing on ground that is permanent.
The lesson, so simple yet so difficult, is that life can be savored even though it contains hardship, disappointment, loss, and even brutality. The choice to see its beauty is available to us at every moment.
-David Von Drehle, The Book of Charlie: Wisdom From the Remarkable American Life of a 109-Year-Old Man
Someone has insulted you? You mean, rather, that you allowed them to insult you.
Because regardless of their intention, what they say is just air moving between the two of you. Their words become an insult only if you regard them as such. Otherwise, they are the uttering of a fool.
Try, therefore, not to be bewildered by appearances, and instead take a break from the situation, put some distance between yourself and the immediate impression. That way you will find that it is easier to retain command of your ruling faculty, your ability to reason.
-Massimo Pigliucci, A Field Guide to a Happy Life
I don't know anything that a young business man ought to keep more entirely to himself than his dislikes, unless it is his likes. It's generally expensive to have either, but it's bankruptcy to tell about them. It's all right to say nothing about the dead but good, but it's better to apply the rule to the living, and especially to the house which is paying your salary.
-George H. Lorimer, Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son
It is impossible for you to become poor by giving. It is impossible for you to become wealthy without giving.
-Kevin Kelly, Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier
Allowing a small number of technologists and financiers to dominate a huge portion of the economy and the information pipeline, and to monetize every aspect of human behavior, seems incompatible with democratic self-determination.
-Joel Kotkin, The Coming of Neo Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class
I now turn to another feature of the human condition that divides us from our simian relatives: the feature of responsibility. We hold each other accountable for what we do, and as a result we understand the world in ways that have not parallel in the lives of other species. Our world, unlike the environment of an animal, contains rights, deserts, and duties; it is a world of self-conscious subjects, in which events are divided into the free and the unfree, those that have reasons and those that are merely caused, those that stem from a rational subject, and those that erupt into the stream of objects with no conscious design. Thinking of the world in this way, we respond to it with emotions that lie beyond the repertoire of other animals: indignation, resentment, and envy; admiration, commitment, and praise—all of which involve the thought of others as accountable subjects with rights and duties and a self-conscious vision of their future and their past. Only responsible beings can feel these emotions, and in feeling them, they situate themselves in some way outside the natural order, standing back from it in judgment.
-Roger Scruton, On Human Nature
Words are energy and cast spells, that’s why it’s called spelling. Change the way you speak about yourself and you can change your life.
-Bruce Lee, with more wisdom here
I grew up under the Cantor's gaze. The celebrated Haussmann portrait of Bach had been given to my parents for safekeeping for the duration of the war, and it took pride of place on the first-floor landing of the old mill in Dorset where I was born. Every night on my way to bed I tried to avoid its forbidding stare.
-John Eliot Gardiner, Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven
People often asked him the secret to longevity, and Charlie was always scrupulously honest: there's no secret, just luck. But if he knew no secrets to a long life, he knew plenty about a happy life. Through tragedy and loss, poverty and setbacks, missteps and blown chances, he maintained a steadiness, an evenness, and a self-reliance that today might be called resilience. He had a gift for seizing joy, grabbing opportunities, and holding on to things that matter. And he had an unusual knack for an even more difficult task: letting go of all the rest.
-David Von Drehle: The Book of Charlie: Wisdom from the Remarkable American Life of a 109-Year-Old Man
We tend to overestimate what we can do in a day, and underestimate what we can achieve in a decade. Miraculous things can be accomplished if you give it ten years. A long game will compound small gains that will be able to overcome even big mistakes.
-Kevin Kelly, Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier
The complexity of problems facing our society—climate change, mass migration, or the effects of technology, for example—may often seem beyond the competency of elected representatives. If higher education made for better people with wiser judgment, it might be tolerable to hand great powers for controlling society to highly educated experts. But as Aldous Huxley observed, scientists and other experts do not own a monopoly on either virtue or political wisdom.
There are clear dangers in ceding too much power to unelected and unaccountable elites who claim moral authority or expertise backed by higher education. Rule by the most educated and highly credentialed people is profoundly illiberal, observes Yascha Motunk, a Harvard progressive. Many elite progressives—the core of the clerisy—might prefer such a model for society, but it would endanger political pluralism, especially when the credentialed elites are overly sure of their own correctness. A survey commissioned by the Atlantic notes that the highly educated are now arguably the least politically tolerant group in America.
-Joel Kotkin, The Coming of NEO Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class
. . . we don't need to do great, powerful, spectacular things to make a genuine difference or to become heroes. Nor do we need to be powerful beings or important leaders. We simply need to do the best we can, even if it seems impossible that we'll end up doing anything special in the long run. It is purely our motivation and great-hearted Bodhicitta in action that counts, not any attachment to a specific outcome.
-Lam Surya Das, Buddha Is As Buddha Does
I dwell on this because I am a little disappointed that you should have made such a mistake in sizing up Milligan. He isn't the brightest man in the office, but he is loyal to me and to the house, and when you have been in business as long as I have you will be inclined to put a pretty high value on loyalty. It is the one commodity that hasn't any market value, and it's the one that you can't pay too much for. You can trust any number of men with your money, but mighty few with your reputation. Half the men who are with the house on pay day are against it the other six.
-George H. Lorimer, Letters From a Self-Made Merchant to His Son
.......................................does a Harvard commencement The American Way
Consider one of those features of people that set them apart from other species: laughter. No other animal laughs. What we call the laughter of the hyena is a species sound that happens to resemble human laughter. To be real laughter it would have to be an expression of amusement—laughter at something, founded in a complex pattern of thought. True, there is also "laughter at what ceases to amuse," as Eliot puts it. But we understand this "hollow" laughter as a deviation from the central case, which is the case of amusement. But what is amusement? No philosopher, it seems to me, has ever quite put a finger on it. Hobbes's description of laughter as "sudden glory" has a certain magical quality; but "glory" suggests that all laughter is a form of triumph, which is surely far from the truth. Schopenhauer, Berson, and Freud have attempted to identify the particular thought that lies at the heart of laughter: none, I think, with more than partial success. Helmuth Plessner has seen laughing and crying as keys to the human condition, features that typify our distinctiveness. But his phenomenological language is opaque and leads to no clear analysis of either laughter or tears,
One contention, however, might reasonably be advanced, which is that laughter expresses an ability to accept our all-too-human inadequacies: by laughing we may attract the community of sentiment that inoculates us against despair. . . . From that suggestion, however, another follows. Only a being who makes judgments can laugh. Typically we laugh at things that fall short or at witticisms that place our actions side by side with the aspirations that they ridicule.
-Roger Scruton, On Human Nature
I know it will be said that in this work I have pointed out a deep malady, and only suggested a superficial remedy. I have tediously insisted that the natural system of banking is that of many banks keeping their own cash reserve, with the penalty of failure before them if they neglect it. I have shown that our system is that of a single bank keeping the whole reserve under no effectual penalty of failure. And yet I propose to retain this system, and only attempt to mend and palliate it.
I can only reply that I propose to retain this system because I am quite sure that it is of no manner of use proposing to alter it. A system of credit which has slowly grown up as years went on, which has suited itself to the course of business, which has forced itself on the habits of men, will not be altered because theorists disapprove of it, or because books are written against it.
-Walter Bagehot, Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market
If we're going to prosper, we have to work. We have to have people subject to carrots and sticks. If you take away the stick the whole system won't work. You can't vote yourself rich. It's an idiotic idea.
Attention is not always within our control. The unexpected, the changeable, the novel, even the habitual in life abduct our focus, intrude upon our awareness, and pull us off course for a time. Attention is like a second skin, a meeting ground for our ever-present grappling with external and internal worlds. Yet well used and nurtured carefully, our networks of attention are our foremost means to shaping our lives. These networks give us extraordinary ways to master ourselves and our environment, offering the key to growth, connection, happiness. Accepting a culture of eroding attention relinquishes this potential for sculpting our individual and collective futures. To paraphrase Walter Mischel's caveat on will, we don't always want to exercise our highest powers of attention, yet if we cannot focus, observe, or judge well, the choice is lost. Will we slip into a dark age of distraction? At journey's end, I searched for final clues in contrasting realms of art and science where attention is nonetheless similarly dissected, rekindled, and venerated. To reverse a darkening time, we must understand, strengthen, and lastly value attention.
-Maggie Jackson, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age
Although the revolution that is taking place in the social condition, the laws, the opinions, and the feelings of men is still very far from being terminated, yet its results already admit of no comparison with anything that the world has ever before witnessed. I go back from age to age up to the remotest antiquity, but I find no parallel to what is occurring before my eyes, as the past has ceased to throw its light upon the future, the mind of man wanders in obscurity.
-Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Book Four, Chapter VIII
. . . it is part of the wise man to recreate and refresh himself with pleasant food and drink, and also with perfumes, with the soft beauty of growing plants, with dress, with music, with many sports, with theatres, and the like, such as every man may make use of without injury to his neighbor. . . . Things are good only insofar as they assist a man to enjoy the life of the mind.
It is not only in science that this attitude of critical reflection is maintained. Matthew Arnold famously described culture as "a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world, and, through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thoughts upon our stock notions and habits." Like so many people wedded to the nineteenth-century view of science, Dawkins overlooks the nineteenth-century reaction—which said, "Wait a minute: science is not the only way to pursue knowledge. There is moral knowledge too, which is the province of practical reason; there is emotional knowledge, which is the province of art, literature, and music. And just possibly there is a transcendental knowledge, which is the province of religion. Why privilege science, just because it sets out to explain the world? Why not give weight to the disciplines that interpret the world and so help us to be at home in it?"
-Roger Scruton, On Human Nature
....................methinks he would be a lot like this.
The best reading strategy I’ve come across is the idea of a wide funnel and tight filter. Be willing to read anything that looks even a little interesting, but abandon it quickly and without mercy if it’s not working for you.
Be choosy about what you let into your attic.
-Morgan Housel, from this post, Paying Attention
Amsterdam in the seventeenth century was a city of bookshops. There were at the time as many as four hundred establishments dedicated to spreading the printed word. Under the tolerant eye of the civil authorities, authors from across Europe sent their wares to Holland for publication, and, as a result, Dutch publishers outproduced their continental rivals in several languages. An important part of the Amsterdam adventure for intellectual visitors as diverse as Leibniz and John Locke, was a visit to one or more of the city's bookshops, where one had the opportunity not just to browse the aisles for contraband literature, but also to sniff out new ideas among the freewheeling bibliophiles, who with the stimulus of coffee and Dutch-made pipes—for smoking had become a national sport— would while the afternoon away discussing novel theories, plotting revolution, and bantering about the latest developments in the republic of letter.
-Matthew Stewart, The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the fate of God in the Modern World
It is one of the distinguishing characteristics of human beings, however, that they can distinguish an idea from the reality represented in it, can entertain propositions from which they withhold their assent, and can move judge-like in the realm of ideas, calling each before the bar of rational argument, accepting them and rejecting them regardless of the reproductive cost.
-Roger Scruton, On Human Nature
Do not rely on the cooperation of those who will rarely give it. Search for a solution that is apart from such cooperation. You may be surprised by how easily such solutions can be found.
Pay attention to who you are around when you feel your best. Be with them more often.
It is our good fortune to live in an age when philosophy is thought to be a harmless affair. As the autumn of 1676 approached, however, Baruch de Spinoza had ample reason to fear for his safety. One of his friends had recently been executed, and another had died in prison. His efforts to publish his definitive work, the Ethics, had come to an end amid threats of criminal prosecution. A leading French theologian named him "the most impious and the most dangerous man of the century." A powerful bishop denounced him as "that insane and evil man, who deserves to be covered with chains and whipped with a rod." To the general public, he was known simply as "the atheist Jew."
-Matthew Stewart, Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World
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